This Nobel Prize Winner Has a Really Strange Theory About the Mind

This video is sponsored by Factor. Get chef-crafted, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. Go to factor75.com and use code WONDERFB50 to get 50% off your first Factor box and free breakfast for one year. In 2003, JM Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When giving his acceptance speech, he didn't discuss his career, he didn't lecture about culture or politics, he didn't thank anyone. He didn't even really discuss literature. Instead, he gave one of, if not the most unusual Nobel Prize acceptance speeches in history. Following a brief reference to a childhood memory, he proceeded to recite a strange kind of parable. When introducing it, he said, The peace is called he and his man, or his man and he. I cannot remember which comes first, he or his man. This was not a lapse in Coetzee's memory. He knew the name of the story. Fundamentally, we all live two separate lives. One is our direct lived experience. That is, what our bodies and brains encounter, produce, and sense. All that is unconscious or external, but nonetheless real and integral to who we are. The second is our conscious awareness. That is, what our conscious mind observes, comprehends, conceptualizes, and tracks through language, ideas, beliefs, and stories. In Coetzee's speech, he refers to two men, he and his man. He is an old, retired sailor who has moved on from adventure and sea life and now spends almost all of his time alone in his room. His primary interaction with the world and others is through reports that he regularly receives from the character referred to as his man, an individual who travels around Europe encountering various events and phenomena. It is soon revealed that the retired sailor is Robinson Crusoe, one of the most famous fictional characters in history. This character originated in the 1719 novel titled Robinson Crusoe, written by the author Daniel Defoe, in which he is an English sailor who is shipwrecked on a remote island for 28 years before finally being rescued. What turns Coetzee's speech from interesting to profound, and perhaps a bit unsettling, is that Crusoe's correspondent, his man, is Daniel Defoe. In other words, Defoe is sending messages to the character he created in the story Coetzee created. In Coetzee's story, Crusoe and Defoe have a strange and ambiguous kind of relationship. On one hand, they seem to know and depend on each other intimately. On the other hand, they appear to be quite unknown and distant to each other. Neither really know the life of the other directly. Crusoe knows of Defoe's experiences only through his reports, and Defoe seems to know of Crusoe, if at all, only as a kind of receiving entity of his reports. Coetzee says, How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this nameless fellow, with whom he shares his evenings, and sometimes his nights too? Who is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new arrivals, and his man gallops about the kingdom, making his inspections? There are many ways one could interpret the premise to such an enigmatic story and character relationship. On a literary level, it seems to possibly be a reflection on the relationship between writer or artist and the characters or things they create. What does a writer or artist do if not report their lived experiences to a kind of entity of reception? Their work, their worlds, and their characters? In this, the creator feels as though they are producing a character, story, or world. But in a way, they are sort of already there. That is, the character, story, or world already exist as a kind of nebulous entity of lived experience. They merely increasingly form into semi-tangible structures as they receive more information from the creator's conscious mind. A kind of embodiment of the creator's awareness and experience as they are assembled with words and features. Coetzee writes, How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come. There's also a deeper interpretation here. The very nature of the mind and consciousness. How we form knowledge and understanding, and how we don't. Whether we write or not, whether we publish or not, each of us are authors. Ourself, the conscious observer and narrator of our lives, is the product of our mind's creative work. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world. The concepts we form and the beliefs we hold. Our source material, our inspiration, is all of the sensations of the body and brain and their interactions with the external world. Naturally, these two channels, experiencer and observer, are always trying to work together. Both born of and sharing the same fundamental substrate of being, they both operate toward the same shared goals. Survival and continuance. On the unconscious experiential level, this is fairly obvious. We automatically try to catch our balance when we trip, move our hand away from something hot or sharp. We blink and breathe automatically. Our heart rate automatically increases and we become adrenalized when we perceive a threat. And so on. On the conscious observer level, it's slightly less obvious, but still apparent. We attempt to make order, meaning, and rigidity out of our experiences through language, concepts, stories, and beliefs. Our conscious mind attempts to make sense of, tolerate, and rationalize events so that we can best endure and proceed onward. Though the miracle of human consciousness and the degree of our conceptual awareness is perhaps only second to the miracle of existence itself, it is, of course, deeply limited. We can only comprehend what we can perceive, and we can only perceive what the human brain has evolved to process. Moreover, words and concepts are always merely a proxy, symbols of reality and experience, never the real things. Thus, these two channels of experience don't really understand each other all that well. One is out in the world, experiencing a chaos of phenomena, while the other is alone inside its room, trying to parse the chaos into clarity. What is left is a kind of dissonance between reality and consciousness. In Coetzee's story, one of the main reports sent back to Crusoe describes what are known as duck decoy systems, elaborate traps constructed to lure wild ducks to be killed for food. Using ponds, nets, channels, and decoy ducks, the configurations are designed to look natural and safe, deceiving the ducks into moving through them until they become trapped. From the ducks' perspectives, they aren't doing anything odd or unnatural. The traps work because they look completely real and safe to the ducks. They see waterways, food, and other ducks, and they simply follow their instincts of perception. But in the end, the pond is not real, and the ducks become consumed. Coetzee writes, By these representations, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks, or decoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told them of, where they shall live safely and securely. Of course, we aren't ducks. But the distance between the abilities of our perception and the true nature of reality is likely inconceivably further than the distance between us and ducks. Like the ducks in the decoy systems, we don't misunderstand reality because we're foolish or irrational or doing anything unnatural. We misunderstand reality because nature deceives us. Reality to us is a human decoy system constructed out of human language, and yet its truth is entirely beyond human language. This interpretation maps fairly cleanly onto several philosophical theories and schools of thought. What is known as Transcendental Idealism, originally founded by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, argues that, in simple terms, human knowledge is forever limited to the appearances of things. That is, we can never access the world that exists outside of human perception. The thing in itself. Reality. What we perceive is inexorably shaped by the a priori structures of the human mind. 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued in his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, the world is fundamentally divided into two components. The will, which is the unified underlying substrate of reality that endlessly strives to sustain and express itself, and representation, which is how the world, or the expressions of the will, appears to consciousness. According to Schopenhauer, we can never directly access the true reality of things except through bodily sensations. The body gives us a kind of access point to the will, a direct subjective correspondent sending us reports. But when trying to interpret and transcribe these reports into concepts and words, we move away from the will and into representation. A distortion. Schopenhauer writes, The world is my representation. This is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun and a hand that feels an earth. That the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself. Everything that exists for knowledge and hence the whole of this world is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. Likewise, the philosophy of Taoism suggests that the observing self, experiencing self, and external world are all inseparable in a state of constant flux carried out by what is referred to as the Tao, the true underlying unified nature of reality. But as such, the Tao exists solely beyond concepts and language. It cannot be named or understood. Ideas and terms, including the Tao itself, can only gesture in its direction. Reality in this case isn't exactly a trap, but trying to comprehend and categorize it is. We must rather flow with it, letting go of rigidity, explanations, and certainties. The opening verse of the Tao Te Ching reads, The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of myriad things. Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence. Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations. These two emerge together but differ in name. The unity is said to be the mystery, mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders. In the end, Coetzee seems to possibly be representing a similar kind of inability to comprehend the world and define the self through a sequence of character relationships. Robinson Crusoe's relationship with his creator, Daniel Defoe, and Crusoe and Defoe's relationship with Coetzee, who, in this story, is sort of their creator. In this web of fiction weaved out of experience, it isn't obvious what and who is real, if anything. Referring back to Coetzee's introduction to his story, when he says, The piece is called he and his man, or his man and he. I cannot remember which comes first, he or his man. There is something subtle yet deeply important in this preface that seems to cleanly summarize the authorship problem of identity and truth. We imagine we are the author of our thoughts and selves, but we are characters being written by the reports of forces we barely understand or have access to. We are both a character being written and the author of the character in the same story. We are not solely the observing mind, we are not solely the experiencing body, and we are not the external world. We are the sum total of all of it, all in constant motion. We are each an expression of the will, the Tao, a universal awareness, or the universe itself, whichever word or concept you like. Because in the end, whichever word or concept you like is irrelevant. Of course, what is relevant to continuing on and flowing with reality is eating. Ironically, despite eating being one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of our condition, getting and preparing good quality, good tasting meals can be extremely time consuming and inconvenient. This video's sponsor, Factor, helps solve that exact problem. Personally, I'm not big into cooking, and I'm someone who tries to prioritize time and focus as well as I can. Shopping and cooking are just not often at the top of that list, if I can avoid them. The problem is, of course, alternatives can be junk food or expensive meals out, but Factor makes it so I can both reduce time shopping and cooking without compromising on taste or nutrition. 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